The Summer Prince (27 page)

“She’s me,” he says, and it’s his own mouth, his own lungs, his own rough vocal cords. I find myself on my knees beside him. He stares unblinking at an empty ceiling. His fingertips graze my palm, and I am breathless and dumb. “We are bound up,” he says. “I stitched her pieces together with myself as the thread. She doesn’t always like it, you know. Sometimes she blames me.”

“Then why do it?”

“Because she raised me. Because she’s true. Because her sewage maintenance lines don’t know what her fono network is doing.”

I frown, though perhaps it’s useless to try to make sense of him. “Do they need to?”

“The Aunties have forced her to be so unnaturally disconnected just so they can have more control.”

“But I love you, June,” says the city again, and she is subdued and resigned.

Shaking, I fall down beside Enki on the floor. It jars me, but I don’t mind. “Why, City?” I ask.

She pauses. “Because Enki used the love of you to tie my external weather sensors to my municipal energy production unit.”

Enki starts to laugh, both his own voice and over the speakers. The stereo makes me want to cover my ears. “What she means is that she loves you because I do.”

I know he doesn’t feel anything for me like what he does for Gil, but today I almost believe him. What if his love is something more than just his mods? Nothing would make me happier, and nothing would scare me more.

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“You know these things never do.”

He turns over and kisses me. I hold my breath and wait for it to end. I can’t handle Enki like this, so himself and so alien and crystal clear. I want my beautiful boy back, the one who danced barefoot before Oreste, the one whose mind was a cipher and whose words I obsessively dowsed for meaning. Now it’s fall, and it will soon be winter, and he is burning so bright I can hardly look at him. Especially not this close. Especially not with his tongue touching mine.

“I’m sorry,” he says, breaking it off. Above us the lights flicker, one second on, one second off, like a message in ancient code.

When are you ever sorry?
I tremble in relief. I wish he would do it again.

“You wanted to tell me something,” I say, because it’s the only thing left.

He waves his hand dismissively. “Oreste wants you to talk to Lucia. The nano girl. Convince her to help keep the war tech out of the city. And give the name of whatever Auntie betrayed us in the first place, of course.”

“Me?”

“She says the girl respects you.”

“Why should I agree?”

He smiles and touches my jaw. “You haven’t said no to Oreste yet.”

The Aunties have kept Lucia in a facility on Tier Two since the demonstration five days ago. Apparently, they’ve attempted to cut a deal with her this entire time, but since she’s still sitting by the window in a small, self-contained, two-room apartment, I assume that she hasn’t agreed.

And so Oreste sent me, inadvertent icon of the technophiles. It makes a certain kind of sense, but I don’t think I’m going to have much luck. Lucia grimaces when I walk into the room. She doesn’t do anything so childish as ignore me, but it couldn’t be much clearer that she wishes I hadn’t come.

“I’m here because Oreste asked,” I say, instead of hello.

“You think that’s going to help your case?” She has a piece of cloth in her hands, and she twists it back and forth with restless, relentless energy.

“Just thought I should be honest about it.”

“Clever way to get back in her graces. You still want the award, don’t you? Octavio said you were ruthless.” I ignore this statement, because acknowledging it might make me run from the room. My desire for this award has started to feel very wrong if I think about it too much. She turns back to the window.

The cloth in her hands is red and ragged around the edges. She’s too young to wear a red headscarf, so I wonder who it belongs to, why she grips it so tight her knuckles have turned pale.

Her hair is kinky and matted — she hasn’t combed it in a few days at least. Her bloodshot eyes scan the view from her window, bleakly watching the pods shunting through transport tunnels and the water rippling by internal pylons down at the base. The view fascinates me for a moment — in my neighborhood, the only buildings with internal views are storage facilities. But I imagine that this look at the city’s apparently endless heart is more familiar to Lucia.

“If you wanted,” I say, “could you do something to disable the weapon tech? Could you make it so we don’t have to be afraid of that silver cloud again?”

Lucia doesn’t look at me, but she pulls the cloth, hard, between her knees. The edge of it starts to rip. “If I wanted,” she says, almost mocking me. “This is ridiculous, you have to know that. They’re
Aunties
. They own the whole world, and suddenly, I’m the only one who knows enough about nanotech to save them?”

“So you could?”

She pulls harder and the rip travels clear down its length. Lucia stares at the pieces for a moment, tosses them to the floor.

“My contact had to give me the schematics to set up the cloud. I modified them to work with the city. Not enough, I guess. I tried to make it shoot paper bullets.”

After the protest, I’d gotten a clear look at what was left of Regina’s body. Dozens and dozens of variously shaped chunks of metal had been hurled at her with such force they left scorch marks in the ground beneath. Some unlucky people near her had needed replacement limbs and reconstructive surgery.

“That was some goddamned paper,” I say.

She squeezes her eyes shut for a moment, but when she opens them again, they’re still wet. “I didn’t mean for it to hurt anyone. It was supposed to intimidate you, not …” She swallows. “I
told
it.”

“Maybe you can’t tell war tech not to kill.”

Her chin juts out a little. “You don’t know anything. The principles of propagation are the same, no matter the nano system. They don’t have an
essence
.”

I shrug. “Maybe they do.”

“If you know so much, why don’t you disable the cloud for them?”

She’s shaking, just a little. I wonder who recruited her. Which of the respected elders from the inner circle had told her she would be doing a good deed? Which of them has abandoned her now?

I step a little closer, remembering the look of that thing, the cool
shadow of it above all of us, that sensation of it watching and waiting for violence without any particular emotion at all.

I might not like Oreste, I might not agree with how the Aunties have handled things so far, but I can’t let anything like that in my city again. Not if there’s something I can do to stop it.

“No one’s seen the cloud since it dissipated.”

“Maybe it’s gone.”

“Maybe it’s growing flowers.”

“Whatever. Doesn’t matter. No one else can reaggregate it.”

She’s stopped looking at me again. I shrug and kneel down; the torn headscarf lies near my feet. When I pick it up, I can see the intricate paneling, the embroidered design along the edges. This isn’t just a woman’s red scarf, it’s a matriarch’s. I think about what it means that this technophile’s prize possession is an ancient piece of cloth, probably hand sewn three generations before.

I finger the rip. It’s along one of the seams, at least. None of the original design has been destroyed. “I know someone who can fix this,” I say. “A whiz with a needle.”

“I’ll give it to a sewing nanopropagator,” she says, “once I get out of here.”

I finger the gold embroidery. I think about a bot that turns
paper
to
metal chunks
, but I just shrug. “Okay,” I say.

I hold it out to her. She snatches it back. “What would
you
do, June? No one is stopping your art. But the thing I love? Everyone wants to hold it back, push it down, keep a leash on it. Even before they put me here, you had all the freedom.”

I think that she’s wrong, that Oreste has forbidden plenty already. But then, the cost of my defiance was never a detention facility or a trial. Lucia has risked a lot more than disqualification from the Queen’s Award for her passion. If I squint, I can see how this must look to her. How insufferable my visit must seem.

I hold that in my head, like the background of a painting. Then I walk past it.

“I haven’t killed anyone.”

She gasps and then sucks in air with a noisy whistle, like I’ve hit her in the stomach. She swings her legs to the floor, but doesn’t seem steady enough to stand up. “I didn’t —”

“You did. You programmed the bot. Why do you think whoever asked you asked, Lucia? No one else in this city knows more than you about nanotech. You’ve even built your own machines. None of the plan would have worked if you hadn’t agreed. And you
knew
where that tech came from.”

“I told it not to! The Pernambuco guerrillas must have sent us faulty tech …”

“That killed people. Funny, Lucia, I’d say it did exactly what it was designed to do. And you know what else I think?”

“That you’re an ignorant, stuck-up, Tier Eight brat who doesn’t know shit?”

I smile. “That the Auntie who put you here knew it. Sure, no problem if you could change things, but then, if it fired real bullets, if it hurt real people, so much the better, right? The cloud disappears as soon as you break up, and now we all know the technophiles can access it anytime.”

“I’m the only one.”

I take a step until I’m a handsbreadth away from her. Even I’m shaking now, with the horror of what happened to Regina and Wanadi. With how much worse it can get unless I can convince this stupid, selfish, naive,
scared
waka to help.

“
You are not
,” I whisper as fiercely as I can. I imagine Gil behind me, his horror at what is happening to his city as fierce as my own. I imagine Enki, quietly aware of what he’s helped to unleash. “They would be fools not to have watched your every move. Maybe you were the only one at first, but now you’re disposable. It’s been five days, Lucia. Has anyone come for you? Are any of your important friends helping you? Two wakas are dead because of what you did. You’ll let them kill more? You’ll let that cloud hang over Palmares Três forever?”

She opens her mouth, chokes, and presses a tight knuckle to her eyes. I wait and watch while she cries. I feel curious and empty and watchful. I pity her, but so distantly it feels frigid.

“And what will happen to me if I do? I get to go back to the verde. I’ve already lost the Queen’s Award. If I give you our one government ally, I lose the nanotech too. I’ll just be stupid Lucia Bolana, future vat custodian.”

I could argue with her. I could say that she has plenty of opportunities, if she’ll just work for them. I could say that maybe nanotech won’t be completely banned, maybe she could work within the system. But the choice I’m forcing on her is bad enough without defending it with such stupid, self-serving lies.

“And you think it’s worth it,” I say instead. “Kill a few more kids, win this political debate, become famous? That’s your plan?”

“You don’t understand —”

“Will you help or not? You’ll get out of here if you disable the nanocloud and name the Auntie who coordinated this. The rest is yours to choose.”

Her lips twist like the red scarf she ripped in two. She stares at its pieces for a moment and then hands them back to me. “Some choice,” she says.

“Make it, Lucia.”

“Get your person to fix it,” she says, nodding at the scarf. “It was my grandmother’s. She wouldn’t like the idea of nanotech either.”

When I realize what she means, my knees almost buckle. Emotion comes rushing back at me like a wave. I hadn’t known how afraid I was until this moment.

“Auntie Maria,” she says.

She shakes her head a little and turns back toward the window, toward the bustling, pulsating, flashing heart of the city.

When I walk back outside, my cheeks sting with the sudden smack of a few unwary camera bots. Lights flash, casters shout questions, the few passersby stop and stare.

“Were you offering your support?”

“Have you seen the new stencils?”

“What do you think of Auntie Maria’s new proposal to stop all immigration to Palmares Três?”

They talk and talk. I take a deep breath, and they pause for a moment. I have to say something. There’s no getting past them, otherwise.

So I look down at the jagged seams of the ancient red headscarf in my hands. “I know someone who can fix this,” I say. “And she’ll use nothing but a needle and a thread.”

“So you’ve converted?” It’s Sebastião, a sheen of sweat on his face, but otherwise perfectly composed and somehow at the front of the crowd. “Is June Costa an isolationist?”

I smile at him. “It means … there’s more than one way to fix a tear, that’s all.”

I push my way through them. Slowly, at first, until Sebastião helps clear a path. Eventually I’m alone again, on a pod shuttling up and up to the rarefied atmosphere of Tier Eight.

“City?” I say. “Can you take me to the northwest corner? Near Gil’s?” I need to give Lucia’s scarf to his mamãe.

“Of course, June,” she says. Smooth and perfect.